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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Denmark diary - day 3

We got
moving slowly today too – I guess we’re really finding it easy to sink into
vacation mode. Once we did get outside, we largely retraced our steps from
yesterday morning, including the same pastry shop (it all tastes good, whether
or not you can pronounce the names) and then to the Grand Teatret movie
theatre, where we saw the British film Weekend
at noon. Although going to a movie might not be regarded as the optimum use of
vacation time, it’s a "tradition" of ours to try to see a film in every new
country, carried on ever since we saw Backbeat
in Paris in 1994 – of course it only works if the local practice is to use
subtitles rather than dubbing, and then we aim to find something on the quirkier
side. Weekend worked perfectly – an acclaimed
movie which for whatever reason never came out in Toronto, and it'll now join
the list of memorable oddities that includes The Brothers Bloom (Jerusalem), Ripley’s
Game (Amsterdam) and Two Days in
Paris (Hong Kong). As always in Europe, the experience feels partially
like going back in time – the theatre has a classic ornate quality, the tickets
assign your seating, and the ads before the movie aren’t all for the latest
gadgets (one of them seemed to be promoting a book, which I can’t imagine anyone
trying to push to the The Dark Knight
Rises audiences). No surprise though, attendance seemed very sparse, and
mostly very old.

After that
we walked back through a different combination of streets – I’m sure one could
keep doing this indefinitely – and then crossed the river again to return to
Christianshavn. We walked in the opposite direction from yesterday, sticking
close to the waterfront, but it’s not that interesting – there’s been a lot of
new development which I’m sure is economically transformative but not very
visually striking. We did however stumble on the somewhat bleak location of
Noma restaurant, sometimes cited as the best in the world – we’d put our names
months ago on a waiting list for reservations, but unsurprisingly didn’t hear anything.

We then
walked into the area of Christiana, founded in 1971 as a kind of
self-proclaimed mini state within an abandoned military barracks, with the objective
of creating “a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds
themselves responsible over the wellbeing of the entire community. Our society
is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be
steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be
averted.” Forty years later it’s still going strong, although with fewer than
1,000 residents, and subject to constant argument and negotiation about its
status, including varying external tolerance of its open hash sales on so-called “Pusher
Avenue”: because these activities are technically illegal, the community enforces
a strict no-photo rule once you're inside. It’s a ramshackle kind of place as you can
imagine, with all kinds of small-scale commerce, and various kinds of occupier architecture
to supplement what came with the barracks. There’s no way as a casual visitor
to assess the merits of the project – a lot of people are obviously just there
for the drugs and the grungy vibe, a lot (like us) to tick it off their Copenhagen highlights list;
it’s hard to sense the deeper core. Certainly the arts and crafts store, the only
one we entered, seemed much more conventional than you might have expected
(filled with exactly the kind of pointless items you might regard as markers of
psychological destituion).

We kept walking, mostly through further nondescript areas, until we
came to the most imposing new structure on Christianshavn, an opera house on
the water, very close to our hotel as the crow flies, but something like an
hour’s walk away in the horseshoe-shaped route required of the non-crow. Which
is exactly how we spent the following hour. I haven’t mentioned yet that
Copenhagen does indeed have as many bikes as its reputation suggests – I’m not
sure what the right of way is in all cases, but I feel it’s much more likely we’d
be taken down by an unseen bike than by a car. People seem to leave their bikes
against every available wall and structure, often seemingly unlocked, and a lot
of the bikes seem in much worse shape than you tend to see back home, where I
guess you ride a bike in the expectation of it being scrutinized (if you’re
going to take sides in the war on the car, you’d better look good doing it). On
a different note, we’re both certain we’ve seen more strollers than we have in
years. I guess there aren’t many babies in our section of downtown Toronto – whether Copenhagen
has a disproportionate number, I just don’t know.

We were going to try having dinner in a more traditional old-time
Danish place, but we couldn’t find it, so we ended up in the Café Oscar (and
doesn’t every European city have a Café Oscar?) where Ally had a veggie burger
and I had pasta, which was all we really wanted anyway. Then we returned to the
same waterfront spot as last night – it’s good to have your mini-rituals, even
on vacation. The sailing ships were initially absent, but then a couple of them
returned – one of them docked right in our eyeline and a group of partiers
disembarked, then the ship slowly transformed itself into something completely
different, with people turning up to set up lights, and others getting on
board and seemingly preparing for an event, and others on bikes stopping
alongside and talking to them as if asking, is there a party or what? However,
even though we observed all this for the best part of an hour, they never
actually launched into a performance comparable to last night. It was a bit chillier (it had rained a bit too while we were in the hotel), and
several of them were heavily wrapped up, so maybe they just lost their nerve.
Either way, the sense of collaboration and possibility, so late at night,
seemed like further confirmation of a city with a young and active soul.